Mini-Gemini: Mining the Potential of Multi-modality Vision Language Models

In this work, we introduce Mini-Gemini, a simple and effective framework enhancing multi-modality Vision Language Models (VLMs). Despite the advancements in VLMs facilitating basic visual dialog and reasoning, a performance gap persists compared to advanced models like GPT-4 and Gemini. We try to narrow the gap by mining the potential of VLMs for better performance and any-to-any workflow from three aspects, i.e., high-resolution visual tokens, high-quality data, and VLM-guided generation. To enhance visual tokens, we propose to utilize an additional visual encoder for high-resolution refinement without increasing the visual token count. We further construct a high-quality dataset that promotes precise image comprehension and reasoning-based generation, expanding the operational scope of current VLMs. In general, Mini-Gemini further mines the potential of VLMs and empowers current frameworks with image understanding, reasoning, and generation simultaneously. Mini-Gemini supports a series of dense and MoE Large Language Models (LLMs) from 2B to 34B. It is demonstrated to achieve leading performance in several zero-shot benchmarks and even surpasses the developed private models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/MiniGemini.

DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving

End-to-end driving has made significant progress in recent years, demonstrating benefits such as system simplicity and competitive driving performance under both open-loop and closed-loop settings. Nevertheless, the lack of interpretability and controllability in its driving decisions hinders real-world deployment for end-to-end driving systems. In this paper, we collect a comprehensive end-to-end driving dataset named DriveCoT, leveraging the CARLA simulator. It contains sensor data, control decisions, and chain-of-thought labels to indicate the reasoning process. We utilize the challenging driving scenarios from the CARLA leaderboard 2.0, which involve high-speed driving and lane-changing, and propose a rule-based expert policy to control the vehicle and generate ground truth labels for its reasoning process across different driving aspects and the final decisions. This dataset can serve as an open-loop end-to-end driving benchmark, enabling the evaluation of accuracy in various chain-of-thought aspects and the final decision. In addition, we propose a baseline model called DriveCoT-Agent, trained on our dataset, to generate chain-of-thought predictions and final decisions. The trained model exhibits strong performance in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed dataset.

DialogGen: Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System for Multi-turn Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have significantly advanced in recent years. However, effective interaction with these models is challenging for average users due to the need for specialized prompt engineering knowledge and the inability to perform multi-turn image generation, hindering a dynamic and iterative creation process. Recent attempts have tried to equip Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with T2I models to bring the user's natural language instructions into reality. Hence, the output modality of MLLMs is extended, and the multi-turn generation quality of T2I models is enhanced thanks to the strong multi-modal comprehension ability of MLLMs. However, many of these works face challenges in identifying correct output modalities and generating coherent images accordingly as the number of output modalities increases and the conversations go deeper. Therefore, we propose DialogGen, an effective pipeline to align off-the-shelf MLLMs and T2I models to build a Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System (MIDS) for multi-turn Text-to-Image generation. It is composed of drawing prompt alignment, careful training data curation, and error correction. Moreover, as the field of MIDS flourishes, comprehensive benchmarks are urgently needed to evaluate MIDS fairly in terms of output modality correctness and multi-modal output coherence. To address this issue, we introduce the Multi-modal Dialogue Benchmark (DialogBen), a comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to assess the ability of MLLMs to generate accurate and coherent multi-modal content that supports image editing. It contains two evaluation metrics to measure the model's ability to switch modalities and the coherence of the output images. Our extensive experiments on DialogBen and user study demonstrate the effectiveness of DialogGen compared with other State-of-the-Art models.

A Survey of Reasoning with Foundation Models

Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.

Mask-Attention-Free Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation

Recently, transformer-based methods have dominated 3D instance segmentation, where mask attention is commonly involved. Specifically, object queries are guided by the initial instance masks in the first cross-attention, and then iteratively refine themselves in a similar manner. However, we observe that the mask-attention pipeline usually leads to slow convergence due to low-recall initial instance masks. Therefore, we abandon the mask attention design and resort to an auxiliary center regression task instead. Through center regression, we effectively overcome the low-recall issue and perform cross-attention by imposing positional prior. To reach this goal, we develop a series of position-aware designs. First, we learn a spatial distribution of 3D locations as the initial position queries. They spread over the 3D space densely, and thus can easily capture the objects in a scene with a high recall. Moreover, we present relative position encoding for the cross-attention and iterative refinement for more accurate position queries. Experiments show that our approach converges 4x faster than existing work, sets a new state of the art on ScanNetv2 3D instance segmentation benchmark, and also demonstrates superior performance across various datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Mask-Attention-Free-Transformer.

DiT-3D: Exploring Plain Diffusion Transformers for 3D Shape Generation

Recent Diffusion Transformers (e.g., DiT) have demonstrated their powerful effectiveness in generating high-quality 2D images. However, it is still being determined whether the Transformer architecture performs equally well in 3D shape generation, as previous 3D diffusion methods mostly adopted the U-Net architecture. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Diffusion Transformer for 3D shape generation, namely DiT-3D, which can directly operate the denoising process on voxelized point clouds using plain Transformers. Compared to existing U-Net approaches, our DiT-3D is more scalable in model size and produces much higher quality generations. Specifically, the DiT-3D adopts the design philosophy of DiT but modifies it by incorporating 3D positional and patch embeddings to adaptively aggregate input from voxelized point clouds. To reduce the computational cost of self-attention in 3D shape generation, we incorporate 3D window attention into Transformer blocks, as the increased 3D token length resulting from the additional dimension of voxels can lead to high computation. Finally, linear and devoxelization layers are used to predict the denoised point clouds. In addition, our transformer architecture supports efficient fine-tuning from 2D to 3D, where the pre-trained DiT-2D checkpoint on ImageNet can significantly improve DiT-3D on ShapeNet. Experimental results on the ShapeNet dataset demonstrate that the proposed DiT-3D achieves state-of-the-art performance in high-fidelity and diverse 3D point cloud generation. In particular, our DiT-3D decreases the 1-Nearest Neighbor Accuracy of the state-of-the-art method by 4.59 and increases the Coverage metric by 3.51 when evaluated on Chamfer Distance.

DiffComplete: Diffusion-based Generative 3D Shape Completion

We introduce a new diffusion-based approach for shape completion on 3D range scans. Compared with prior deterministic and probabilistic methods, we strike a balance between realism, multi-modality, and high fidelity. We propose DiffComplete by casting shape completion as a generative task conditioned on the incomplete shape. Our key designs are two-fold. First, we devise a hierarchical feature aggregation mechanism to inject conditional features in a spatially-consistent manner. So, we can capture both local details and broader contexts of the conditional inputs to control the shape completion. Second, we propose an occupancy-aware fusion strategy in our model to enable the completion of multiple partial shapes and introduce higher flexibility on the input conditions. DiffComplete sets a new SOTA performance (e.g., 40% decrease on l_1 error) on two large-scale 3D shape completion benchmarks. Our completed shapes not only have a realistic outlook compared with the deterministic methods but also exhibit high similarity to the ground truths compared with the probabilistic alternatives. Further, DiffComplete has strong generalizability on objects of entirely unseen classes for both synthetic and real data, eliminating the need for model re-training in various applications.

TriVol: Point Cloud Rendering via Triple Volumes

Existing learning-based methods for point cloud rendering adopt various 3D representations and feature querying mechanisms to alleviate the sparsity problem of point clouds. However, artifacts still appear in rendered images, due to the challenges in extracting continuous and discriminative 3D features from point clouds. In this paper, we present a dense while lightweight 3D representation, named TriVol, that can be combined with NeRF to render photo-realistic images from point clouds. Our TriVol consists of triple slim volumes, each of which is encoded from the point cloud. TriVol has two advantages. First, it fuses respective fields at different scales and thus extracts local and non-local features for discriminative representation. Second, since the volume size is greatly reduced, our 3D decoder can be efficiently inferred, allowing us to increase the resolution of the 3D space to render more point details. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks with varying kinds of scenes/objects demonstrate our framework's effectiveness compared with current approaches. Moreover, our framework has excellent generalization ability to render a category of scenes/objects without fine-tuning.

ICM-3D: Instantiated Category Modeling for 3D Instance Segmentation

Separating 3D point clouds into individual instances is an important task for 3D vision. It is challenging due to the unknown and varying number of instances in a scene. Existing deep learning based works focus on a two-step pipeline: first learn a feature embedding and then cluster the points. Such a two-step pipeline leads to disconnected intermediate objectives. In this paper, we propose an integrated reformulation of 3D instance segmentation as a per-point classification problem. We propose ICM-3D, a single-step method to segment 3D instances via instantiated categorization. The augmented category information is automatically constructed from 3D spatial positions. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of ICM-3D and show that it obtains inspiring performance across multiple frameworks, backbones and benchmarks.

Simultaneous Semantic and Collision Learning for 6-DoF Grasp Pose Estimation

Grasping in cluttered scenes has always been a great challenge for robots, due to the requirement of the ability to well understand the scene and object information. Previous works usually assume that the geometry information of the objects is available, or utilize a step-wise, multi-stage strategy to predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses. In this work, we propose to formalize the 6-DoF grasp pose estimation as a simultaneous multi-task learning problem. In a unified framework, we jointly predict the feasible 6-DoF grasp poses, instance semantic segmentation, and collision information. The whole framework is jointly optimized and end-to-end differentiable. Our model is evaluated on large-scale benchmarks as well as the real robot system. On the public dataset, our method outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (+4.08 AP). We also demonstrate the implementation of our model on a real robotic platform and show that the robot can accurately grasp target objects in cluttered scenarios with a high success rate. Project link: https://openbyterobotics.github.io/sscl